Make Fascists Unf*ckable Again
There’s an unusual scene early in the fourth season of The Boys, Amazon’s show about fascist superheroes and the underground cell working to bring them down. The episode follows characters as they attend a Qanon-esque convention (“TruthCon”) filled with peddlers of racist conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions. Unlike much of The Boys, which focuses on sadistic super-powered narcissists, the TruthCon attendees are run-of-the-mill peons. They share their heroes’ ignorance, but not their strength.
It’s a small — not minor — expansion of the show. A typical episode limits our view to the “supes,” a wickedly corrupt group of powerful superhumans who can only be held in check by the threat of low ratings and lost licensing deals. (Although in one case, a supe is killed by a rectally-implanted bomb.) They are “heroes” only to a massively deceived public that has been more present in this most recent season, rioting in a January 6th-like insurrection and being brutally murdered by their god-like idols. It’s moments like these that have led right-wing fans to suddenly sit up and realize that The Boys is, in fact, talking about them. And they don’t like it.
“It was such a good show in the beginning,” writes one Twitter user, taking a break from his usual posts crusading against inclusivity in video games. But now it’s “leftist drivel.” Another review on Amazon calls the latest season “openly hostile toward Christianity.”
It’s easy to celebrate the upset right-wing fans who realize, too late, that The Boys was a critique of fascists all along. A recent promo poster for the show highlights the negative reviews as they rain down on a celebrating supe like confetti. “The fools!” the poster triumphantly implies, “What did they think they were watching this whole time?”
But as fun as mockery is, we could learn a lot by answering that question. Given that these fans returned for the first three seasons, the answer seems to be that, up till now, they found nothing in The Boys that offended their ideology. That’s saying something. Over those first three seasons, supes went on racist killing sprees, raped women, and covered up their crimes. When Homelander (a sociopathic Superman) murders an adversarial politician and his child in the series premiere, right-wing bullies apparently shrugged and thought, “That’s what you get for messing with someone more powerful than you.”
This is the challenge of depicting fascists on screen: for the amoral fascist audience, there is no portrayal that can be considered immoral. Whether the fictional fascist takes the form of a grizzled vigilante bashing in anyone he deems criminal (Watchmen, Batman, Judge Dredd), a lion-hearted hero protecting the Earth from aliens (Iron Man), or literally-Adolf-Hitler-but-he’s-a-silly-goose (Jojo Rabbit) makes absolutely no difference to a fascist audience, so long as he has power.
It’s a risk that filmmakers should know well by now, because audiences have found monstrous characters compelling for decades. Scarface is a nearly three-hour takedown of greed and the American dream, but Tony Montana remains an icon for get-rich-quick hustlers. Nihilistic finance bros literally cheered for the scummy Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. And for years, Michael Douglas has denounced his fans in investment banking, who idolize his villainous portrayal of Gordon Gecko. “It was all very seductive I guess,” Douglas mused. High-minded art lovers will complain that those audiences, like right-wingers watching The Boys, are missing the point. Perhaps that’s true, or perhaps they simply don’t care. The result is the same: A portrayal of a powerful figure, meant as critique, is misconstrued by philistine power worshippers as fantasy. (It’s a condition so widespread that writer Adam Serwer recently named it “Tony Soprano Syndrome.”) If ostensibly critical filmmakers keep creating seductive villains who inspire fascist adoration, then who’s really missing the point?
It’s often suggested that laughing at fascists is the best way to solve this problem. “Humourists [have] created a vanguard against tyranny,” one writer declared in 2016, citing the usual constellation of liberal late night comics, SNL, and Daily Show alumni. “A lot of my comedy heroes who were Jewish used humor to mock this very thing,”Jojo Rabbit’s Stephen Merchant said of Nazism. Merchant plays a Gestapo officer in the film, alternately ridiculous and imposing. But pronouncements of comedy’s effectiveness ignore one crucial fact: Fascists don’t care about being laughed at, so long as they have power. On the subject of Jojo’s goofy Hitler, writer Noah Berlatsky reminds us that, “Ironic, aestheticized, anti-establishment Hitler is in many respects congruent with the original irreverent, anti-establishment aesthetic of the Nazi Party. That’s an aesthetic that the alt-right has consciously tried to recapture today.” In a since-deleted thread on 4chan, the primordial goo of the irreverent alt-right, one user admires that Merchant’s character “looked like the perfect Aryan supersoldier.”
Our mistake is in thinking that fascists crave to be taken seriously. That’s projection. Those who value the fair administration of justice, neutral institutions, and impartial expertise strive to be taken seriously, for obvious reasons: their system cannot function if everyone thinks they’re a joke. But that’s not the goal of the fascists, who seek power without consent of the governed. In fact, as fascists gain power, they seem to revel in just how unserious they can be: messaging their hate in silly frog cartoons, wearing objectively hideous hats, naming their government initiatives after childish memes, spreading outlandish conspiracy theories that they may not even believe themselves. Liberal comedians have spent countless hours lampooning and mocking the obvious ridiculousness of it all, but their barbs seem to be as effective as the political cabarets of 1930s Berlin, which, in the sarcastic words of comedian Peter Cook, “did so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler.”
#Resistance comedy and cinematic tragedies have tried, over and over, to embarrass the fascists. But Trump has shown just as often that a fascist will never express — perhaps cannot feel — shame. Filmmakers can depict a fascist as a tragic failure or a laughingstock all they want; it will do nothing to produce self-reflection in his real-life counterpart.
How, then, should fascists be depicted? The answer can be found in 2020’s Promising Young Woman, a movie about a woman taking revenge on the men who sexually assaulted her friend. While the men of PYW aren’t outright fascists — we don’t learn enough about their politics to apply the label — they share fascism’s most defining characteristic: a will to power, or in this case, a will for sexual power over the bodies of young women. PYW’s men are unique in cinema. To understand why, let’s first look at the standard way we see abusers on screen.
2000’s Unbreakable gives a textbook example: a monstrous man, a dark room, a vulnerable woman, a degrading act of dehumanization. The framing makes sense, in that it squares well with the social values that most of us share. But, crucially, sexual predators don’t share those values. When they see Unbreakable’s abuser dominate a woman, it’s possible that they don’t see an act worth condemning; perhaps they merely see power working as it should.
Promising Young Woman solves this problem by depicting would-be assailants not as outright monsters, but as powerless losers. Early in the film, the heroine repels an assault by a geeky Christopher Mintz-Plasse, still recognizable as one of cinema’s biggest dorks, McLovin. The abusers don’t get any cooler from there. Throughout PYW, horrible men are cast as twerps who prey on women out of weakness, not strength. This is not a nuanced portrayal. The film never asks that we understand or forgive the men for their weakness.
It’s a brilliant choice, and not because these men aren’t monsters: they are. But framing them solely as monsters does nothing to disturb the self-image of a real-life assailant. Casting them as powerless moon-faced dweebs? There’s nothing there for the power-hungry fascist to idolize.
We’ve already seen this approach work against real-world fascists. In the headier days of the Harris campaign, an official press release described Trump as “old and quite weird?” That same week, internet memesters circulated rumors that JD Vance admitted to having sex with a couch. The rumors were baseless, the memes a knowing parody of online misinformation. But the Harris campaign kept beating the “weird” drum, and it stuck. “Weird” isn’t incompatible with “cool,” but leveled against Trump and Vance, it might as well have been “virgins.” Emphasizing Trump’s weirdness over his monstrosity clearly riled him. For once, Trump found himself on the defensive. “They’re the weird ones,” he told a radio host, implicitly acknowledging “weird” as a cutting line. He added, pathetically, “Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” The denial continued in private fundraisers, where Trump told donors that the jab was, “Not about me. They’re saying that about JD.” The New York Times called that period of the summer “the worst three weeks of [his] campaign.”
In the end, of course, the Harris campaign dropped the “weird” attack (on the advice of pollster Geoff Garin, now 0–3 on presidential campaigns) and instead amplified the voices of former generals who warned that Trump idolized Hitler. Trump is a power-hungry monster, they implored, which, while true, is an accusation that plays into Trump’s self-image and that of his followers. (It’s also not particularly new: articles about Trump’s fascination with Hitler ran in 2017, and those cited earlier reports from as far back as 1990.) Trump denied the reporting and attacked the press. His followers shrugged. To fascists, “monster” is not a slur.
But “loser” is. There is nothing seductive about losers, nothing enviable. Losers can be pitiable, but the abusers of Promising Young Woman are not the lovable nerds of Freaks & Geeks or Stranger Things. They’re scumbags with no redeeming qualities. PYW doesn’t ask that we psychoanalyze them like they’re Tony Soprano or Travis Bickle. It refuses to engage with their delusions, their sense of entitlement. It places them at the lowest tier of social standing, one devoid of power and masculinity, and moves on. It’s a brutally effective way to depict fascists, and one that The Boys has found perhaps too late.
Can a show about super-powered fascists ever avoid becoming a power fantasy for fascists? Maybe not. But if it can give us more scenes of those pathetic followers — the powerless rubes who will die meaningless, ignoble deaths — then it just might manage to detonate a bomb that fascists didn’t realize was inside them. Maybe even one inserted rectally.
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Evan Engel produces non-fiction videos and podcasts and writes fiction screenplays.
